Understanding Of Intimacy Research Articles

Female Desire in the Epistolary Novels of South Slavic Women Writers (Hanka by Slovene Croat Writer Zofka Kveder and Jedno dopisivanje by Serbian writer Julka Chlapec-Đorđević)

This paper, which deals with Central European literature in the comparative perspective, contains an analysis of the representation of intimacy and love (female desire) in the epistolary novels Hanka (1918) written by the Slovene Croat writer and feminist Zofka Kveder (1878-1926) and Jedno dopisivanje. Fragmenti romana (A Correspondence. Fragments of a Novel, 1932) by the Serbian writer and feminist Julka Chlapec-Đorđević (1882-1969). Both of these South Slavic women writers and feminists were cultural nomads with multiple linguistic identities, part of the Habsburgian myth, and they lived for a time in Prague, then an important city of European modernism and the avant-garde. In the novels, they created a picture of a new woman and her intimate world, focusing on the motifs of love and extramarital affairs. In the novel Hanka, readers follow the thematization of the new independent woman and her intimacy in the chaos of the apocalypse of the First World War, focusing on representations of the idealized love of a woman for a man and a woman’s suppressed desire. Julka Chlapec-Đorđević inherited the legacy of Zofka Kveder in Prague, and her novel Jedno dopisivanje is an homage to Kveder’s artistic achievements. The writer depicts gender intimacy in fictitious letters between Marija Prohasková from Prague and her lover Oton Šrepan, a doctor from Slovenia. In both case studies, the representation of the secret love affair and writer´s understanding of intimacy and romantic love as the key concepts of modernity will be examined.

‘Are we falling apart?’: manufacturing familyhood through transnationalism

ABSTRACT This article initiates methodological discussions to understand how transnationalism manufactures cultural discourse of family practices and repairs intimacy within family-kin relationships from a distance. Prior studies in family ties overstate the shifts in family practices by highlighting the dichotomy of ‘modern’ and ‘tradition’ intimacy. However, family practices and intimacy are more compelling, and require empirical examination of how migrants interact and restore meaningful relationships in different cultural landscapes with their family-kin. Contributing to this literature, this article explores the repairing process of transnationalism in building meaningful familiar relationships from a distance, and the reconfiguration of the meanings and practices of familyhood in the migration process. Drawing on insight from interview data gathered from transnational Turkish migrants in the UK, this article argues that migration does not merely transform the family-kin practices, the understanding of intimacy and personal life of migrants; it brings emotional and ontological security. This paper raises questions on the role of migration in repairing intimacy and family practices, rather than shift and disjuncture the familiar connections. Therefore, it negotiates how migration provides space and courage to migrants to repair their intimacy and relationships with family-kin and reconfigure the meaning of familyhood while they enact their lives transnationally.

Citizen Myles

The following paper proposes a reading of American poet Eileen Myles’ 2007 poetry collection Sorry, Tree in the interrelated contexts of Lauren Berlant’s understanding of intimacy and her concept of intimate citizenship, Lee Edelman’s understanding of sexuality and negativity, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s sense of the contemporary as always untimely. An openly lesbian and queer author, Myles gestures towards the sawed and the disempowered, olering an intimate, yet unmistakably political negotiation of a minoritarian lesbian position as both denant and transformative of the (hetero)normative status quo through acts of observation, engagement, and participation that do not necessarily have to be conspicuous or successful to elect reconceptualization of the social; rather, Myles suggests that individual agency in the public world also resides in failure as illuminative of the fact that one’s desire for presence is continuously actualized through entanglement with negativity.

Fisting intimacy: The sexual scripting of intimacy in gay men’s anal fisting

ABSTRACT Anal fisting has often been caricatured as an aggressive, if not violent, mode of sexual and erotic practice between gay men, circumscribed by discourses of risk, danger, and even death. In this study, I explore how a sample of 28 South African gay men who regularly incorporate anal fisting into their preferred sexual practices construct and understand the experience of intimacy in the practices and relations of their fist-fucking. Through sexual scripting theory and a Thematic Analysis of unstructured individual interviews conducted with participants, the results highlight a scripting of intimacy with/in anal fisting that is grounded on three recurrent and interrelated themes: trust and vulnerability; connection and communication; as well as pleasure and skill. The results of this study draw attention to the ways in which anal fisting is not only experienced as a deeply intimate form of pleasure and lovemaking for its participants, but, moreover, how the construction and understanding of intimacy in fist-fucking is framed as a queer/er mode of anal sex/uality and erotics that defines and constitutes itself in contradistinction to both hetero- and homo-normative scripts.

Queer Intimacy and the Disruption of Latinx Masculinity in Justin Torres’s We the Animals (2011)

This article examines the nuanced representation of Latinx masculinities in Justin Torres's We the Animals (2011). I take from Joseph Pierce's assertion that the family structure is already inherently queered because it fails to adhere to the heteropatriarchal structure it sets out to impose. The familial intimacy allows for an examination of the inherently queered nature of family structures because of the contradictory nature of intimacy. I anchor my understanding of intimacy in Lauren Berlant's description where intimacy is a generative framework to push against structures that are by their construct oppressive, building liberating new worlds. By dissecting the portrayal of the father, brotherly relationships, and familial contradictions, I show how intimacy serves as a generative space to reimagine representations of masculinity that are less binary and more all-encompassing. Ultimately, the novel reveals a queered understanding of masculinity, one that fails to meet the gendered definitions imposed on male bodies but provides new, albeit contradictory, representations of masculinity.

The quirky intimacy of femme mental health memes

ABSTRACT This paper identifies an affective aesthetic of “quirkiness” that femme meme authors popularized on Instagram. Building on feminist scholarship that reads new media through affect theory, this paper isolates quirkiness to understand how social media impacts Millennial and Generation Z understandings of intimacy and creates digital intimate publics. The femme memes analyzed as quirky create a similar experience for viewers because their authors express a frustration with navigating social expectations as a non-ideal neoliberal subject, especially as an individual dealing with mental illness. Quirkiness, I argue, engages the tension of social contra private by proliferating dissonance through frank revelations, satires of postfeminism, and ironic detachment. In this dissonance, quirkiness reads as absurd and bizarre and yet also—if understood properly—authentic and relatable. Quirkiness deploys the author’s affective labor to create intimacy for the viewer, who relates positively with the author’s cathartic expression of non-normative perspectives. Through the mechanics of Instagram, quirkiness inadvertently undergoes commodification and re-packages intimacy as cultural currency.

Intimacy in Dyadic Sexually Explicit Media Featuring Men Who Have Sex with Men

ABSTRACT Sexually explicit material (SEM) featuring men who have sex with men (MSM) may be a source of information about intimacy in same-sex male relationships for MSM. However, little is known about how MSM SEM depicts intimacy between male performers. The current study examined the 220 most viewed dyadic scenes of MSM SEM videos for the presence of verbal intimacy (compliments, personal disclosure, and expressions of care) and physical intimacy (kissing, cuddling, affectionate touch, and genital touch before and after sex) between performers. At least one example of physical and verbal intimacy was present in the majority of videos (91% and 68% of videos, respectively). Most forms of physical and verbal intimacy occurred before or during sex, with intimacy being least evident post-sex. We also tested if the presence of intimacy was associated with viewer interactions with videos (likes and dislikes) and number of views. Only one of seven forms of intimacy, care (verbal), was associated with more interactions (i.e., likes and dislikes per 100,000 views), and there was no association with the number of views. Potential implications for MSM’s understandings of intimacy are recognized and discussed with reference to sexual script theory.

PENDIDIKAN SEKS PADA ANAK USIA DINI DITINJAU DALAM PERSPEKTIF PENDIDIKAN AGAMA ISLAM

Introducing sex education in early childhood in the modern era is not such a taboo instead of being forbidden from discussion. Given the widespread sexual abuse and child abuse, this phenomenon should be a concern for all circles. Not only do families and educators participate in addressing the issue but also the wider community has to provide supervision and take account of it. Introducing or giving early childhood understanding about sex that refers to Islamic religious education which is widely discussed by Muslim intellectuals based on such religious sources as theQur'an,Hadith, Ijma and so fourth are part of dealing with the problem of child sexual abuse. On this stand, Sex education is not but such an information about the importance of knowing the name and function of body parts, the understanding of sex differences, the understanding of intimacy or sexual relationship as well as the understanding of the existing values and norms in society related to gender identity and inculcating religious cometment will greatly help children pass through the next stage of age

Teenagers' personal accounts of experiences with digital intimate partner violence and abuse

BackgroundWhile in-person intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA) among teenagers has been widely studied in the past two decades, knowledge about the role digital media plays in IPVA is limited. ObjectiveThe aims of the study were to explore the nature of digital IPVA among victimized teenagers and how digital IPVA co-occurs with other forms of dating violence in this age group. MethodSemi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of 14 teenagers (12 girls), aged 15–18 years old, who had experienced digital IPVA victimization. AnalysisThe teenagers' personal experiences with digital IPVA victimization, were analyzed using thematic analysis. ResultsFour categories of digital IPVA victimization were identified: harassment, control, monitoring, and sexual coercion. Additionally, many respondents reported that digital IPVA co-occurred with similar forms of in-person victimization. However, a few experienced digital victimization only. ConclusionThe findings show that digital IPVA is multifaceted with severe impact on teenagers' lives. It can co-occur with in-person IPVA but can also be restricted to the digital arena. Nevertheless, digital IPVA occurs within the framework of intimate relationships. Prevention efforts should target young people's understanding of intimacy, sexuality, and what it means to be in an intimate relationship.

The grace of motherhood: disabled women contending with societal denial of intimacy, pregnancy, and motherhood in Ethiopia

This study aimed to provide better understanding of intimacy and marriage, pregnancy, birth, and motherhood experiences of women with disability in Ethiopia. Qualitative, in-depth, and semi-structured interviews along with personal observations were used to explore the full experiences of participants, as told in their own words. The result of the interviews indicated that relationships and motherhood proved a very rewarding option for women with disabilities. They also expressed their need for intimacy regardless of society’s denial. Challenges identified include negative societal attitudes toward women with disabilities regarding relationship, pregnancy, and child-rearing. Accessibility of health centers in addition to the ignorance and negative attitudes of the physicians are also reported to be major challenges for the interviewees. This study highlights how rewarding the experience of motherhood was for the interviewees and also shows that women with disabilities face challenges at every step of their experiences, because of society’s prejudices toward disability.

Materializing Intimacy

What part do physical environments play in materializing relationships? How is intimacy created in specific places, through specific objects? What do these places and objects imply about our understandings of intimacy? To answer these questions, I draw on fieldwork I conducted in Québec, Canada, and mobilize the tools of ethnography and qualitative social research to create a methodological bricolage with the aim of making familiar cultural processes seem strange (Clifford 1986). My project of making intimacy “strange” draws from queer studies and materiality and affect theories, which aim to deconstruct heteronormativity and to de-center the focus on humans, based on the work of Bruno Latour (2005), Tim Ingold (2012), Judith Butler (2002) and Sara Ahmed (2004). I use the material as a point of entry to understand how intimacies are performed and subtly mediated by elements that go unnoticed in common sense definitions of intimacy. From this perspective, intimacy is created by a combination of things: humans, objects, spaces, affect and texts that are each more or less attached to collective and personal aspirations. My contribution lies in showing how some objects and places are involved in the performativity of intimacies, and how the material can create ephemeral intimacies and concretize relationships. The cases I work through indicate a capacity for the (re)creation of intimacy, the reproduction of normative ideas, as well as a kind of distributed agency through the multiplicity of things that are necessary to achieve intimacy.

Masculine Bodies, Selfies, and the (Re)configurations of Intimacy

This article is part of a research about the use of selfies in two different apps, Grindr and Instagram. We are interested in exploring how selfies relate to masculine bodies and produce different negotiations of intimacy. Selfies are personal, bodily centered, and highly visible. Understanding their production can contribute to the discussion on the digital exposure of intimacy and on the (self) management of masculine bodies. We consider selfies as discursive media that merge the visual and the discursive. Through their practice, users actively negotiate their masculine bodies and their intimacies and question and/or affirm hegemonies. Based on visual analysis and qualitative data obtained from observation and structured interviews, our results point out to the active production of selfies in relation to the different apps and to different styles of bodies that (in)visibilize different body parts and/or emotional traits. Selfies (re)present hegemonic, resistant, and emergent bodies with different understandings of intimacy.

New kinships, new family formations and negotiations of intimacy via social media sites

The article investigates how the technology of social media sites facilitates new kinds of intimacy and kinship. It analyses what happens when ‘donor families’ – families with children conceived via sperm donation – connect with each other online. Inspired by Lauren Berlant’s understanding of intimacy as a promise of belonging, the article investigates how new kinship relations facilitate belonging and practices of intimacy. While Berlant uses ‘intimacy’ as a general, normative term, this article explores small, individual and everyday negotiations of – and tensions related to – intimacy in order to illustrate how the narrative of intimacy is experienced and negotiated. Through analysis of and interviews with members of a Facebook group that connects donor families, the article describes the experiences of forming new alternative families and argues that new kinship relations can both lead to new intimacies and be perceived as threats to existing intimacy and nuclear family formations. Finally, the article illustrates how users experience emotions more intensely online than offline, and suggests that the terms traditionally used in relation to intimacy are inadequate for understanding intimacy in a digital era.

Intimate Worlds

This study investigates wills, inventories, and probate records and identifies high numbers of women reinforcing kinship relations, demonstrating commitment, signifying resilience, and arranging emotional investment in female-centered families. As well as allotting property and possessions, the will also acts as a statement of female emotional strength and declares a woman’s most cherished desires, offering an insight into an important awareness of the way they thought about their personal relationships as well as into the facts and statistics about their life cycles. This definition challenges heteronormative classifications of the structure of the family and intimate relationships and attains a closer understanding of intimacy in early modern families.

Considerations of Equality in Heterosexual Single Mothers’ Intimacy Narratives

This paper explores experiences and expectations of equality within the intimacy narratives of UK single mothers. A perceived lack of equality was often cited by participants as a contributing factor in relationship breakdown, contradicting notions of increasing democracy ( Giddens, 1992 ). For those who had grown up aspiring to egalitarian relationships, experiences of inequality engendered disappointment. Yet narratives simultaneously contained longings for the perceived certainty of traditional gendered roles associated with more stable, committed, enduring relationships - an ideal model of intimacy against which intimate lives were measured. Narratives were therefore marked by ambivalence as participants navigated their way through different understandings of intimacy, while managing challenging situations. While equality in intimate relationships was viewed as a possibility by some, participants often felt it was out of reach due to a lack of suitable potential partners. For others achieving stability in relationships was the main priority. This article therefore argues that commentators who two decades ago heralded a brave new world of equality in intimate lives ( Giddens, 1992 ) were overly optimistic; the narratives discussed here reveal a more contextualised, complex and uneven picture of contemporary intimacies.

‘I don't know if you want to know this’: carers’ understandings of intimacy in long-term relationships when one partner has dementia

ABSTRACTThis article explores experiences of relational intimacy (including sexual intimacy) in long-term relationships when one partner has dementia. An emerging body of research focuses on living with dementia, but work on relationships between people with dementia and their family and loved ones tends to focus on understanding the experience of caring, and on constructs like ‘care burden’. Research concerned with the lived experience of relationships themselves is less frequent, and very little published work focuses on experiences of sex and intimacy. This qualitative study explores how six participants experience their intimate relationships with their partners with dementia. Semi-structured interviews provided a rich source of data which were analysed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. Three master themes emerged from our analysis: ‘everydayness’, ‘absent presence’ and ‘I don't know if you want to know this…’. Participants explored how living with dementia constructed specific, everyday relational challenges, and disrupted everyday intimacies. Intimacy, including sexual intimacy, remains an important element of older couple relationships. Relational experiences present specific and difficult to articulate experiences for the partners of people living with dementia – particularly experiences related to sex and sexuality. Representations of older adults (particularly older adults with a long-term illness) as relatively asexual beings can make elements of these relational challenges particularly difficult to express.

Love stories of the occupation: storytelling and the counter‐geopolitics of intimacy

Though research on Israel/Palestine often privileges the macro‐geopolitical perspective, a growing body of work has begun to catalogue the ways in which the violence of occupation is carried out through intimate spaces and practices. However, often missing from such accounts is an understanding of intimacy as a counter‐veiling political force. Looking at the ‘Love Under Apartheid’ project in Palestine, and queer anti‐occupation organising in Israel, this paper considers how storytelling can serve as both a research methodology and political intervention, changing the way geopolitical stories are told and unfold.

Companions of Heart and Hearth

This article presents knowledge about adversity and the changing nature of families in early modern townships. It proposes that the shape of the family changed across Nantwich (Cheshire) townships with some neighborhoods presenting very high numbers of female heads of household. While stressing variations, it presents new evidence on the subject of close family relationships. It puts forward the view that the elevated numbers of women living together demonstrates commitment, resilience, and emotional investment in female-centered families. This finding challenges heteronormative definitions of intimate relationships and indicates the need for further research to achieve a better understanding of intimacy in early modern families. This study additionally examines subjects of charity, health, hardship, credit and debt, and the accompanying struggles that were played out in the social sphere. In an important observation concerning the ever-changing composition of the family, this investigation ascertains that the family configuration changed according to fluctuating socioeconomic circumstances. What is also offered here is a contribution to knowledge about the county of Cheshire from the Hearth Tax for which there are no available Hearth Tax studies. This study investigates wills, inventories, probate records, deeds, poor accounts, and parish records and provides an insight into hardship through a close study of all of the poor in one street in 1664. It finds that poor children worked hard and when apprenticed were also compulsorily separated from the family home and that child mortality was equally high among rich and poor people in early modern Nantwich townships.

Sexuality and couple intimacy in dementia

The review assesses recent research and its impact on understanding of intimacy and sexuality in older adults with dementia. There is no universally accepted definition of inappropriate sexual behaviors (ISBs), but they have been divided into overt acts associated with increased libido and uninhibited sexual behaviors directed at oneself or other people. Couples affected by dementia frequently maintain physical intimacy. Nonintercourse intimate activities may be preferred over intercourse. Early therapeutic interventions may assist partners in modifying activities, behaviors, and expectations about the future of the relationship. Inappropriate sexual behaviors are commonly due to the disruption of interconnected brain structures. Trauma to the temporal lobes may lead to hypersexuality and ISB. Trauma to the limbic system can produce changes in sexual preference. Both temporal and frontotemporal dementias, or either of them, often present with socially and sexually inappropriate behaviors. Huntington's disease can exhibit hypersexuality, pedophilia, promiscuity, and marital infidelity. The involvement of the medial striatum of the basal ganglia in this disease explains the prevalence of ISB. There is no consensus regarding first-line pharmacotherapy for ISB. Little information is known about the adverse effects. Clinicians and society need to consider how dementia might affect physical intimacy.

Architectures of ‘the Good Life’: Queer Assemblages and the Composition of Intimate Citizenship

This paper examines how the practices and events of queer collectivity might encourage us to think differently about the relationship between sexuality, intimacy, and citizenship. Through the exposition and discussion of four ‘scenes’ based on ethnographic engagements with various LGBT collectives in Baltimore, MD, it attends to the visceral and more-than-human registers in which a fragile sense of community comes into being, subsequently developing an understanding of intimacy as a transversal sphere of mutual investment in which political and civic practices can be cultivated. This entails an analytical shift from understanding citizenship as a ‘practice of claims’ within a (supra)national legal framework to its conceptualization as a ‘practice of composition’, which brings into relief the civic nature of collective efforts towards the creation and maintenance of safe environments that foster marginalized expressions of sexuality, gender, and pleasure. These attempts to experiment with new forms of belonging and ‘the good life’ are animated by the intimate associations, practices, and events that traverse public and private space—times. Ultimately, then, it is argued that intimacy is itself a proper mode of citizenship, one of its ‘regimes of enunciation’ that is folded into many contiguous others, and that a concern for the composition of ‘civic intimacies’ productively augments and complicates established research on intimate/sexual citizenship.